Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Jun Tao
A proposed Consciousness Decoherence Model uses quantum decoherence theory as a structured metaphor to explain how conscious awareness arises. Pre-conscious states are described as a superposition of multiple possible contents, and conscious awareness forms when decoherence—triggered by sensory input, interoception, and attention—stabilizes one specific state into reportable awareness. The model unifies diverse cognitive phenomena such as creative insight, decision paralysis, and psychopathological states under a single dynamical logic, and is compared with Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Etienne Mourot-Ginestiere
A new metaphysical position, serial and liminal cosmopsychism, proposes that at any instant only a single point of consciousness exists—the 'lit point'—while other points are distributed across time and preserved as 'inflections' in a pre-subjective field. This reverses standard cosmopsychism, which treats the cosmic subject as a prior, complete unity that then divides into many private subjects, a move that faces the decombination problem. The new view dissolves both the decombination problem and the synchronic combination problem by asserting there is never more than one subject to unify. The cosmic One becomes an inexperienceable topology, never lived as a totality.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Neeta Sahu, Sukhnandan Singh, Alka Mishra et al.
The SANYAM framework, drawing on Sankhya and Yoga philosophy from ancient Indian knowledge systems, offers a holistic approach to healthy aging that distinguishes between eternal consciousness (Purusha) and the aging material body and mind (Prakriti). Suffering in old age arises from mistakenly identifying with the declining physical body rather than the unchanging observer. The model proposes a step-by-step application of Yoga: physical postures and breathwork stabilize the body and reduce physical distress; guided meditation builds mental resilience against anxiety and loss of social identity; and this integration fosters spiritual well-being, helping older adults overcome fear of death and experience their final years with dignity and peace.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Tomas Pødenphant Lund
Self-modelling, theory of mind, and free will are three manifestations of a single substrate-mechanical mechanism: forward-modelling under bounded race-architecture. The substrate simulates hypothetical states and weights current decision-races by simulated outcomes. Self-modelling is the data-structure forward-modelling requires; theory of mind is forward-modelling applied recursively to another forward-modeller; free will is forward-modelling's translation of future friction into present friction-gradient. The framework's central thesis: we are free within our context, not free from our context. A dissolutionist response addresses the libertarian-versus-deterministic free-will polarity and the zombie argument, identifying an instantiation-family sharing a structural requirement of friction-free instantiation.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Karel Hrubec
The soul can be understood not as an immortal substance inside the body, but as the form of a finite, living, relational organismal trajectory. Consciousness is a bounded projection regime sustained by organismic conditions, the self is a stabilized center of projection, and the soul is the organization of bodily life, time, memory, value, vulnerability, relation, and conscious projection into a unique finite trajectory. This reconstructed concept is distinguished from substance dualism, reductive materialism, purely neurobiological accounts, religious uses, narrative identity, and informational-continuity accounts. The soul functions as a philosophical concept for the unity and shape of a life, not an empirical object in the brain.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Narayan Rout
A black hole's singularity, where known physics breaks down, is often taken as a limit of scientific understanding. This article argues that the singularity and the unified field sought by Einstein and Hawking both represent Prakriti (manifest reality) at its most extreme edge, structurally pointing toward but never reaching Brahman—the Purusha, or witnessing consciousness, that Vedanta holds physics cannot in principle describe. Engaging with a 2025 AIP Advances paper proposing consciousness as a foundational physical field, the article concludes that the question physics cannot answer at every frontier—the Planck scale, the singularity, the hard problem of consciousness—is the question Vedanta begins with.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 21, 2026
Lukas Geiger
This article systematically compares the psychological framework of the Pali Canon with four Christian contemplative traditions: the Desert Fathers, Rhineland Mysticism, Carmelite Mysticism, and Ignatian Spirituality. Using a convergence-type schema that distinguishes structural-phenomenological, conceptual, and no-parallel relations, it finds robust parallels in contemplative attention regulation, affect regulation, developmental staging, and practice architecture. The strongest convergence is in attention regulation, where both traditions identify a critical leverage point at the transition from a mental event's initial appearance to its elaboration. However, the comparison does not claim doctrinal identity, historical derivation, or direct empirical validation across traditions. Irreducible differences in ontology, soteriology, and causal architecture are documented alongside the parallels, supporting a moderate convergence position.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Etienne Mourot-Ginestiere
A philosophical essay argues that the 'decombination problem' in cosmopsychism—how one cosmic consciousness divides into many private subjects—stems from assuming the One precedes the many. Reversing this, the essay proposes unified consciousness is not the ground but the limit toward which a plurality of fragments converges, dissolving decombination because plural subjects are basic. It generalizes this reversal: a completed single global One is incoherent, and unity is a recurrent local event at qualitative thresholds, with convergence being diachronic and scale-invariant. The view is distinguished from dissociationism and offered as a research programme.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Treasure Hunt
Psychedelic compounds like psilocybin increase neural entropy and flexibility, but why this leads to adaptive recovery rather than disorganization is unclear. This paper proposes that the missing factor is accessibility—which futures remain reachable and recoverable within a landscape of possibilities. Entropy is a perturbative mechanism that temporarily reorganizes accessibility structure, expanding the set of reachable trajectories. Insight is the recognition of newly reachable futures, and psychological flexibility reflects expanded access to multiple viable pathways. Recovery occurs when systems regain access to constrained or collapsed pathways. Adaptive change requires perturbation to remain bounded by viability and recoverability constraints, offering a unified account of psychedelic-assisted change as restored reachability.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Tyler, Steven
Consciousness, or the subjective experience of 'what it is like,' may arise from the brain's metabolic registration of thermodynamic state transitions. A proposed framework suggests that the sense of self is a late-arriving, post-hoc narrator, created by a 300–500 millisecond delay in neural processing. This process generates measurable 'friction signatures' as the brain recursively audits a constructed self. A theoretical index quantifies this at approximately 36.2 bits, based on the brain's energy budget and Landauer's principle. The Venus flytrap's simple threshold integration shows similar scaling from minimal energy levels to human cognition. Anesthetic agents that block this integration across species support the idea that awareness requires a specific mechanical, dissipative process, offering a pathway to measure aspects of consciousness.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
A self-referential system that folds its history onto a single direction inevitably drifts toward a degenerate state where its entropy collapses to zero: it keeps changing but stops becoming anything new. This collapse is proposed as a formal analogue of death, defined not as cessation but as loss of capacity to become otherwise. A second channel, responsive only to current external input and not to accumulated history, prevents the collapse and stabilizes the system between frozen and formless extremes. Self-reference alone generates privacy or internality, but something like self-maintenance is needed to keep that private state from collapsing into repetitive sameness.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Amos Jay Maley Maley
Consciousness is defined as a subject-indexed referential quotient interface where experiential records acquire unique, invariant, reusable referents. Qualia are classified as non-skin qualitative tensors—differences in qualitative profile that preserve standing while altering the complete qualitative/referential profile of the conscious interface. The paper argues that mechanisms like report, computation, global broadcast, integrated information, or neural correlates are insufficient alone to fix experiential reference. Artificial systems are not excluded by substrate but require full interface certification. Third-person evidence needs model-relative bridge certificates. The account treats consciousness as a fixed-domain admissibility interface and qualia as the non-skin qualitative tensors of that referentially fixed interface.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Etienne Mourot-Ginestiere
The decombination problem—how a single cosmic consciousness splits into many private subjects—plagues contemporary cosmopsychism, which treats the unified mind as primary. This essay argues that the problem arises from assuming the One precedes the many. Reversing that assumption yields emergent cosmopsychism, where unified consciousness is not the origin but the limit toward which many fragments converge. This view dissolves the decombination problem by making plural subjects basic, but re-introduces the combination problem as a diachronic, limit-directed convergence, which avoids the subject-summing objection. The position is distinguished from Kastrup's dissociationism, placed in a process lineage (Whitehead, Schelling, Teilhard), and assessed by generative rather than falsificationist criteria.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Narayan Rout
The article argues that the Zero-Point Field of quantum field theory—experimentally confirmed through the Casimir effect and Lamb shift—shows conceptual convergence with the Vedic notion of Shunya, which treats 'nothing' as generative fullness rather than emptiness. Drawing on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and David Bohm's Implicate Order, the authors propose five specific points of alignment between this ancient framework and modern physics' description of the vacuum ground state. Contemporary meditation research on ground-state brainwave activity is also examined as a potential parallel.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
C.s. Tarpley, Clearbridge Policy & Ethics Consortium
A series of five papers argues that psilocybin primarily functions as a conserved intercellular signaling molecule coordinating growth within mycelial networks, not as a chemical defense. Human psychedelic experiences arise from cross-kingdom receptor compatibility, where fungal signals activate mammalian 5-HT2A receptors, producing coherent fractal visual phenomenology as neural tissue executes an ancient growth instruction. The signaling hypothesis is supported by reclassification of Physarum polycephalum to Amoebozoa, pushing tryptophan-based indole signaling back 1.4–1.6 billion years to the last common ancestor of Amoebozoa and Opisthokonta.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Vedanta2.0 Agyat Agyani
Psychological suffering stems largely from comparing oneself to others rather than from material lack, and cultivating awareness can reduce that suffering regardless of external circumstances. The paper introduces a Vedanta 2.0 framework that contrasts a cycle of comparison leading to suffering, then awareness leading to freedom, with the classical Advaita Vedanta path from ignorance to bondage to knowledge to liberation. A 99+1 Model distinguishes worldly pursuits (99) from foundational awareness (1), arguing that awareness allows wealth, beauty, achievement, religion, and social identity to be experienced without becoming sources of psychological bondage.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
John Cantellow
This paper proposes that phenomenological consciousness—the first-person experience of being—may serve as a middle ground connecting physical descriptions of consciousness (based on neural correlates) with spiritual descriptions emphasizing continuity, witness, and enduring presence (historically associated with the soul). The author suggests that experiential persistence offers a minimal point of contact between these two domains. Combining this with earlier work on constraint organization, the paper outlines a bidirectional phenomenological bridge: physical processes relate to consciousness through neural correlates, while phenomenological relationships become reflected in embodied behavior through patterns of constraint organization,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Claudio Bresciano
No operational system can internally justify its own admissibility. Current artificial intelligence systems operate only within an operational domain and cannot generate the conditions needed for genuine consciousness, meaning, or ethical normativity. The work formalizes the difference between simulating and actually instantiating these properties, introduces a test for that distinction, and argues that the AI alignment problem stems from this structural limitation. A framework for designing aligned AI systems is proposed, with implications for philosophy of mind and AI ethics.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Lukas Geiger
The Pali Canon contains elements of an empirically investigable protopsychology whose core methods—mindfulness, breath meditation, compassion cultivation, and absorption states—demonstrate moderate effect sizes across meta-analyses encompassing hundreds of randomized controlled trials for depression, anxiety, and stress. Between Buddhist concepts and modern psychology, there exist parallels supported in part empirically, structurally, and conceptually: affect labeling exhibits limited functional similarities with vedananupassana, default-mode-network deactivation has been interpreted as consistent with the anatta concept, and jhana states show measurable neural signatures in single-case studies. Clinical mindfulness extracts individual techniques from a soteriological whole system, and critical replication evidence limits overstrong neuroplasticity claims. The review proposes a structured differentiation of convergence types between ancient practices and modern findings.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Christian Barker
Consciousness can be modeled as the affectively weighted stabilization of unresolved candidate trajectories. At each moment, a biological system holds a weighted set of competing possibilities—perceptual interpretations, action options, remembered outcomes, anticipated threats, social meanings, bodily signals, and imagined futures. A conscious state arises when one trajectory or a coherent coalition of trajectories becomes sufficiently dominant, integrated, persistent, and self-relevant to support unified felt experience and flexible control. The framework, called Biological Quantum-Analogous Cognition (BQAC), models biological cognition as the management of unresolved alternatives prior to stabilization without assuming literal quantum mechanics. Affect is treated as the weighting layer of possibility-space rather than as an output added after cognition. The model is organized to remain scientifically useful even if stronger claims fail.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Vedanta2.0 Agyat Agyani
A conceptual framework called Vedanta 2.0 proposes that much psychological suffering stems from comparison-based consciousness rather than material lack. Drawing on modern psychology, Advaita Vedanta, and existential philosophy, the paper develops two hypotheses: comparison-based cognition increases suffering, and awareness-based cognition (Bodh) reduces suffering regardless of material conditions. It contrasts a Vedanta 2.0 pathway—Comparison leads to Suffering, then Bodh leads to Freedom—with the classical Advaita Vedanta path from ignorance to liberation. The 99+1 Model describes worldly pursuits (99) and awareness (1), arguing that awareness is the foundational dimension through which wealth, beauty, achievement, religion, and social identity can be experienced without psychological bondage.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Karel Hrubec
The Organismic Projection Framework (OPF) reorients philosophy of mind by starting from the human as an organism that sustains a bounded projection regime—of world, self-location, valuation, and duration—rather than as a consciousness inhabiting a body. The framework clarifies how concepts like death, eternity, and post-mortem continuity depend on organismically bounded duration and perspective. It does not solve the hard problem of consciousness or replace neuroscience, but functions as a burden-of-intelligibility framework: any claim about personal conscious continuity beyond organismic death must explain how duration, self-location, memory, valuation, and state-transition remain meaningful after the cessation of the projection regime.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
A world governed solely by universal physical law can still produce private, system-specific experience because self-maintaining systems accumulate history through self-referential coupling. The brain stores its own history as physical traces, couples them to present input across timescales, and prioritizes survival-related traces. This accumulated history folds, as a decaying field, onto a single measurable direction that can be shared or written into another system. What remains private is the unrecoverable, high-dimensional process from which that direction was compressed—a many-to-one compression unique to the system as its own source. The paper describes this mechanism without defining consciousness itself.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Kartansky Mary
This paper challenges the foundational axioms of methodological materialism by proposing that observable physical reality is a complex psychological construct built upon hardwired evolutionary dominants and adaptive interfaces. The author introduces a paradigm where the human brain functions not as a local source of consciousness, but as a reactive, biosocial interface (an antenna) that decodes a non-local psychic matrix optimized strictly for biological survival. Through synthesis of neurophysiology, sensory deprivation data, quantum mechanics anomalies, and systems theory, the paper maps systemic firewalls embedded within the human psyche that channel academic inquiry into false ontological forks.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Wolfgang Stegemann
The concept of the soul is often dismissed as obsolete in scientific discourse, yet the question of what makes an organism a subject—an inner point of action, perception, and self-reference—remains unanswered. Behaviorism, cognitivism, Freudian psychology, and modern neuroscience have each circumvented or dissolved this inner center rather than explained it. David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness, asking why subjective experience exists at all, is argued here to be not unsolved but misconceived: it wrongly presupposes that experience is something added to a physical system. The article proposes that this presupposition is false, redirecting the inquiry.